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Mika wants him to be normal. She’s never said it but he knows she does so Raizo decides to practice his facial expressions in the oval mirror above his face bowl every morning.
For uncertain: He raises his eyebrows a little. For sad: He lowers his chin. For happy: He smiles so wide it just skirts the edge of crazy.
Interestingly enough, it’s anger he has the most trouble showing. It was one of the first emotions the Ozunu tried to scrub from their assassins’ brains. Angry men got sloppy, angry men failed their missions and dishonored their clans because they allowed feelings to get the better of them. He’ll never forget the proof of it after his loss to Takeshi. Nothing could’ve driven Ozunu’s point home better.
He starts to memorize other men’s faces from the movies they see and he tries to imitate their expressions. Lips pulled back from their teeth in a growl, nostrils flared, eyes narrowed but none of it looks right. Not for the first time, he thinks he should just leave. Pack his things up and disappear while she’s asleep or at work or on the phone. It would be easy, it would be safer for the both of them, it would be for the best.
He thinks of a big man dying bloody in a bathroom, of shoving a girl into a washing machine, of slicing so many ninja’s he no longer knows his body count . He looks into the mirror and tries to feel something about that. Regretful—lips slightly pouty, ashamed—eyes downcast, proud—chin up and eyes challenging but he comes up empty. He doesn’t feel anything about their deaths because they were all carried out emotionlessly. He’d been like a machine, all reaction with no reason.
He hears her come into the front door and when she calls his name from the foyer, he squeezes the rim of the sink until his knuckles are white. He knows then that he won’t be going anywhere.
The one emotion he’s been most successful at achieving is selfishness.
-
The first time he sees her completely naked is a Tuesday afternoon six months after their trip and almost two years after they first met.
He keeps his eyes open the entire time.
Studies how she moves and what she likes, learns that a gasp is good and a bitten lip is bad and that this is nothing like what he’s experienced before. He’s used to a mutually beneficial act before finding the nearest exit. Raizo had been taught that sex was an extraneous biological desire. Something completely unnecessary that one did before moving on to more important endeavors.
Now that Mika’s lying under him, eyes screwed shut and legs wrapped tightly around his hips, he can’t think of a matter more in need of his attention. He figures out that she likes to be teased even though she says she doesn’t by how wet she gets when all he does is rock inside of her. By the way her body clutches and sucks at him, by the way she spreads her knees and tries to get him to just start moving when he refuses to speed up.
He discovers that he likes it best when she’s on top and rides him hard, when she squeezes his shoulders so tightly he carries marks in the shape of her fingers afterward. He knows he should heal them immediately—the last thing he needs is any sort of identifying mark. Anything that could catch someone’s attention—but he likes to feel their dull heat as he walks throughout the Europol offices. As he attends meetings and types write-ups and gets dressed for work the next day only to have her help him get undressed later that night.
He stares at the skin on the back of her neck afterward and rolls onto his side to spoon against her naked back. In his previous occupation, it was Raizo’s job to find the weak points of his opponents and exploit them. He reaches around her prone body, scrapes his nail across her nipple lightly and watches it harden with flatly curious eyes.
He doesn’t think sex is much different.
-
She’s started to tell him about her past. How hot and dry Arizona was, about summers in Florida and how she needed twelve stitches when she cut her foot trying to outrun the train that ran through the woods behind her grandmother’s house.
He already knew most of what she was sharing, it was easy to find information on her, too easy, but he’s already taken care of that and he loves to listen to her speak of home. To hear the cadence and inflections in her voice change as she says words like Mom and Dad and Grandma.
-
Mika likes to play a game.
Whenever they go to a grocery store or to a department store or whenever she can drag Raizo to the mall, she’ll try to slip away from him. He knows she’s begun to chafe underneath his unflinching gaze so—when he’s got other business to attend to—he’ll let her think she has.
Today, he’s got his arm across the chest of his other business in the second floor mens restroom. His shirt’s sticking to his back with sweat and there’s blood trickling from a shallow cut at the woman's temple that would’ve been a killing blow if she hadn’t been able to twist away from him at the last minute.
“How long have you been shadowing me,” he asks dispassionately.
She laughs and with one practiced move, he pulls her arm from it’s socket. She lets out a shuddering breath and he continues. “I’ll ask again, how long have you been shadowing me?”
“Long enough. I know you work for Europol, I know about the little hole in the wall bakery you buy croissants from on your way to work and about your favorite club to visit on Saturday nights.”
He doesn’t react to the realization that she’s been trailing them for weeks without him picking up on it or how it’s even possible that he could let such a thing happen. Because Mika makes you weak, he thinks. Because sparring three days a week at the gym is a poor substitute for fighting another ninja, for fighting another predator.
He shakes the thoughts off and she leans her head back against his chest. If someone were to see them now, that person might think they were lovers. “I even know that little startled sound she makes when you push inside of her. “
He moves so quickly he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it until the woman’s wrist is broken. She grunts in pain, he brings his knee up into her side and hears the sickening crunch of ribs breaking. This is all muscle memory to him. No matter how out of practice he gets, he’ll never be able to fully forget.
She spits out blood and laughs with a wheeze. “Do what you want to me. I won’t be the last visitor you’ll have to receive.” She looks back over her shoulder with a smile, her mouth black with gore. “We’ll be seeing y—”
He snaps her neck before she can finish, drags her into a stall and sits her on the toilet seat. He’s got to get out of here, right now. He exits the stall, washes his hands quickly and splashes water on his face. He straightens his shirt and gingerly touches the bruise on his side from when she surprised him with a punch to his kidneys. He won’t have time to heal it here. He approaches the door and listens carefully before walking through calmly and spotting Mika not five yards away.
“I was wondering where you were.” She whispers and walks toward him with a smile. She likes to pretend that their separations are incidental and though he doesn’t understand her reasons, he respects them."We got separated."
“I guess we did.”
She wraps her arm around him, jostling his wound and sending a starling bolt of pain up through his body. He smiles back and pulls her into his arms, doesn’t even flinch.
-
She’s lying on her back, damp with sweat, naked and dully lit up by the crescent moon just outside of her bedroom window when she finally speaks. “Raizo?” She says without turning to face him.
“Yes?”
He rolls onto his side and her eyes are closed, the back of her palms flat and open on either side of her torso like a corpse and he brings his hand to the small ridge of scar tissue between her breasts. Makes sure it’s still rising and falling with her breath.
“You can talk to me.” She says lowly. “You can tell me anything and I’d never judge you.”
“There’s nothing—“
“Don’t,” she cuts in, eyes suddenly open and glaring at him intensely. He thinks this is what anger is supposed to look like. He sits back and listens.
“I would’ve let you get away with that a year ago or even a day ago but not tonight.” She stops and takes a breath, pulls herself up into a seated position. “They found a dead woman in the second floor bathroom at the mall a few days ago. They said she’d been beaten but that nothing was stolen and she hadn’t been raped. They’re also saying that even though there are security cameras right outside the door, they don’t show her or her attacker entering the bathroom.” She quiets to let what she’s trying to convey sink in. “You wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”
He could say anything to Mika right now and make her believe it. He could tell her that he had no idea who the woman was, that one of his old contacts was angry and sent someone after them, that the woman was a random ninja that decided to come after him to build her name up. He could probably make himself believe it was one of those things but he’d fought the woman, had spoken to her—We’ll be seeing you…— and he recognized the dead eyed resolve in her face. She'd been on a suicide mission. This was more than a one off, it was a warning, and it should be more important than what Mika would think of him if she knew everything he’d been trying so hard to keep quiet.
He pushes the hair back from her forehead, uses his thumb to smooth the frown lines from her brow.
But it isn’t. “I don’t know anything about it, Mika.”
Her eyes get hard at that. She’s learned to read him as well as he can read her and she knows he’s lying. He waits for her to raise her voice, to stump from the room, to show him her displeasure but she only lays back down and turns away from him.
At this moment, Raizo thinks about telling her everything.
About being an orphan and how an employee there sold him to the clan, about the hours and hours of training, about getting cut and bruised and beaten to raise his pain threshold. About Kiriko and how she was the first person he ever loved. How she was sweet and giving and not born to the profession the way he had been. He wonders if she’d ever look at him the same way when she learned that he stood by while Kiriko was killed.
He could tell her that the other clans are not letting him off the hook for decimating the Ozunu clan. That they’re going to kill them both and that she probably would’ve been spared if he’d left but that he made the decision for them both and stayed. Would she cry If he told her that there’s no use in running? That they’ll find them anywhere they go and that—sooner or
later—they’ll be caught.
His hand hovers over the puckered skin on her back, at the exact place where Ozunu’s blade cleanly sliced through, before he lets it drop. Raizo’s a pragmatic man, he knows she wouldn’t stand a chance in a hand to hand fight with a ninja and he knows she’d try and be more involved with his efforts to protect them if she knew what was happening.
He rolls onto his back and stares at the play of shadows on the ceiling. When his desire to unload on her climbs up inside of him—clawing and burning and choking him with it’s need to be free—he just pushes it back down and carries the heavy weight of it himself.
He can’t ever tell her.
He won’t ever tell her.
Even if it’s what she wants, even if his silence will be the thing that eventually drives her away. He has to protect her at all costs. Even if it hurts.
This is how much he cares.